Did you hear the one about four poets walking into a bar? How about four bars (which is about right for poets)? How about a pint in each for them and their friends (actually, friends of Jasper Magazine, who, given the evening’s literary and other perks, got quite a deal for $25 a head)? The poets: Ed Madden, Ray McManus, Tara Powell, and Kristine Hartvigsen. The bars: White Mule, The Whig, Hunter Gatherer, and Thirsty Fellow, which spread from Columbia’s midtown Main Street to south of the Vista on Gadsden, leaving plenty of opportunities to stop between hops shops to read aloud a poem or five for the assembled crowd. The crowd: about two dozen (even before the first pint it was difficult to count, this crowd being social, with everyone wanting to talk to everyone else. If you know what I’m talking about, then you were (or should have been) on Jasper Magazine’s first Pint & Poem Walk on Wednesday.

Everyone seemed to agree that poetry and beer make for a better mix than, say, poetry and lecture halls or auditoriums or anywhere an audience is expected to stay still and dry until the wine-and-cheese reception afterward, when they’re expected to remain on their best behavior and the wine is rarely any good.

Cindi Boiter, Jasper’s founder, editor, and the evening’s host, said London pubs and poets do such things all the time. Why not Columbia? (A question that has the makings of a motto for the city’s arts community: Why not, Columbia? or Why not Columbia? — why shouldn’t this little city, where the cost of living is low and artists and writers are more plentiful than a lot of people realize make the arts as much of a priority as big business?)

A stop in front of the Statehouse marked the Pint & Poem midpoint at 9:30 p.m., and the Occupy Columbia brigade clearly felt more enthusiastic about having few poets in their midst than they would have been about, say, a group of CEOs and other one percenters. Having in the past several days perfected the rhythm of antiphonal chanting, they gathered about Madden with placards in hand, repeating each line of the poem he read as if it were a slogan (sometimes, the line particularly complex, he had to say it twice till everyone got it right). Poetry for the rest of us.